Of Songs, Stories and WikiLeaks

Two kinds of drone figured in “The Language of the Future,” Laurie Anderson’s two-part, two-night performance for the River to River Festival on Tuesday and Wednesday: “Stories” on Tuesday and “Songs” on Wednesday (though stories and songs were included on both nights). There were the minimalist musical drones — often double-stops bowed on her electric violin — that have been part of her songs since she emerged in the 1980s. And this week, topically, there were airborne drones: a pair of remote-controlled aircraft, like flying black spiders the diameter of a Frisbee, that darted over the audience during part of “Songs” on Wednesday.

Onstage Ms. Anderson ruminated on how the Internet had become “the new dragnet” and urged the audience to telephone the comment line of the White House — she provided the number — with opinions on the trial of Pfc. Bradley Manning over supplying documents to WikiLeaks.

Recent revelations of pervasive data collection by the National Security Agency presented an opportunity for Ms. Anderson, whose multimedia work has pondered technology, travel, science, communication and the meaning of America. Over a funky beat from her band, she named Mr. Manning, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and Edward J. Snowden, the former C.I.A. worker, intelligence contractor and admitted source of the latest revelations, adding, “Let’s hear it for the whistle-blowers!” for easy applause.

“What’s going on in America?” she intoned. “What’s happening here? What war is this? What time is it? Greetings to the motherland.” Later, she summarized “The Birds,” the Aristophanes comedy, comparing the walls in its plot to walls between Palestine and Israel and the United States and Mexico, calling them “complicated.”

That was as pointed as Ms. Anderson got during the two performances, which were largely a miscellany of her works and fascinations, old and new, hit and miss. Both performances were scheduled at Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City, on the Hudson River, but rain on Tuesday moved “Stories” indoors to the Stuyvesant High School auditorium — a better spot, actually, for a spooky, inward-looking show.

The title of “The Language of the Future,” and some of its best material, came from “United States,” her eight-hour magnum opus from 1983, and one unexpected upshot of the two nights was the realization of how little Ms. Anderson has changed in 30 years. Each night began with downtown electronic noise: Tuesday with the Annie Gosfield Trio, which put driving rock backbeats behind crunching, clanging samples, and Wednesday with Richard Devine, who used an analog setup with patch cords and knobs for blipping, twitching, ratcheting abstractions. (Ms. Anderson has also chosen other performers for the festival.)

Both “Stories” and “Songs” interspersed material with words — most often recited in Ms. Anderson’s calm, amiably noncommittal deadpan — and brooding instrumentals. The music revolved around floating keyboard chords and the interplay of Ms. Anderson on violin and Eyvind Kang on viola, whose parts sometimes tilted the music toward non-Western modes — sometimes leisurely, sometimes sawing and heaving. The tone, particularly on Tuesday, was somberly meditative, with suspense that didn’t bode well.

Ms. Anderson’s stories are philosophical shaggy-dog stories, leading not to neat conclusions but to revelations of paradox, emptiness and eternity. Tuesday’s performance kept returning to scenarios of airplane travel, with disasters looming. Its centerpiece, read by Steve Buscemi, was a detailed narrative of a crash landing in the Arctic and the decline of the survivors, rendered all the more desolate with a prolonged, varied guitar drone played by Gerry Leonard.

“Songs,” presented outdoors on an idyllic evening, was jauntier, even with its edge of technological paranoia and political tension. The lineup included a horn section to punch up the riffs in Ms. Anderson’s songs from the 1980s, like “From the Air” and “Let X=X,” which had declared, back then, that “I can see the future.” Her equipment was newer now, but her language of the past is still the language of the future.

Correction:June 22, 2013

A review on Friday about Laurie Anderson’s performances Tuesday and Wednesday at the River to River Festival misstated the given name of a musician who played with her trio on Tuesday night. She is Annie Gosfield, not Anne.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Of Songs, Stories and WikiLeaks . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe